The Raven Cycle—or at least the first book in the series, The Raven Boys—is set here, in Virginia, not more than a few hours’ drive from me, and in the same mountains that I call home. Another friend of mine who doesn’t even know Gwen raves to me about these books too. She’s a local. She says that she knows the mountains that Stiefvater describes and communities like Henrietta and loves how well she has captured the atmosphere of this region.

Well, I expected to like—no, I expected to love this series. When I found out that we were dealing with Welsh mythology, I expected to love it even more. I expected to fall hard.

And I fell. I texted Gwen reactions when my feelings could not be contained and my poor mother got snapped at when she quipped at me for rebuking one of the characters aloud (sorry, Mom). But I didn’t fall as hard as I would have liked to do, and I think I know why:

This hit buttons—different buttons—for Gwen, Katie, and I. It contains independent story threads and independent goals from at least four point of view characters—and the background characters, those who don’t get to narrate, are reluctant to be background characters; how could they be when every woman in the Sargent household is larger than life and every member of Gansey’s found family is inseparable from the others? The story tiptoes along the blurred lines of several different genres: fantasy quest, romance, ghost story, realistic fiction bordering on issue book for grounding…. It was—perhaps—too much to put into one book. There’s something of this book that reminds me of a television season written when the writers expect to be cancelled.

This series is shelved in romance in our store, but it seems an odd choice. It begins with the promise of a true love, and then a second promise that Blue is either Gansey’s true love or his killer (jury’s out on that one), but it feels as if Stiefvater was least interested in the romance in this series. Or maybe I was least interest in the romance. I see the prophecies about Blue and her true love to be like the pressures I feel and see that are slowly killing the population’s ability to have a platonic relationship with members of the opposite sex. It almost seems to me that the romance and the prophecies exist perhaps primarily because of the pressure exerted on writers to include romance and love triangles in their teen fiction.

I would put this in fantasy and choose to focus on the quest and hope that it inspires people to pick up dowsing rods and wander the woods around my home instead of hoping that it inspires girls to long for two boys competing for their attention.

I feel like I’ve come down hard on this book, that I’m focusing too much on what I didn’t like and not enough on the fact that I did tear through this book, I did long to return to it when I had to put it down, did read it whenever I had a moment, and did get emotionally invested enough in the characters to chide them aloud and be hit with at least one reveal hard enough to leave me reeling—even if I sensed that some reveal was coming.

I just wanted more time–more time to spend on the individual threads of this story and with the individual narrators of this story. Luckily, there are another three books. I finished this book on September 24, and I’m already anxiously awaiting the return of book 2 to my store’s stock so that I can return to Henrietta.

****

Stiefvater, Maggie. The Raven Cycle, Book 1: The Raven Boys. New York: Scholastic, 2013. First published 2012.

This review is not endorsed by Maggie Stiefvater or Scholastic, Inc. It is an independent, honest review by a reader.